Tag: transparency

Federal Reserve Refuses To Provide Records Of Foreign Gold Holdings

Weeks after Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell evaded a sitting congressman’s questions about the central bank’s foreign gold holdings, the Fed has also declined to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request for records about such holdings.

The Federal Reserve’s lack of transparency comes amidst reports that countries are removing their gold and other assets from the U.S. in the wake of the unprecedented Western sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. According to a 2023 Invesco survey, a “substantial percentage” of central banks expressed concern about how the U.S. and its allies froze nearly half of Russia’s $650 billion gold and forex reserves.

Rep. Alex Mooney, R-W.Va., asked Powell about the matter in a December letter, only to have the Fed chair respond last month with evasive non-answers, telling him that the Federal Reserve does not own gold but holds it as a custodian for other entities—a fact that the congressman presumably already knew.

Following Powell’s evasive response, Headline USA filed a FOIA request with the Fed for records reflecting how much gold the Federal Reserve Bank of New York currently holds in its vault, as well as records reflecting the ownership stake that each of FRBNY’s central bank/government clients have in that gold. The FOIA request also sought records about the Fed’s gold holdings prior to Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

However, the Federal Reserve denied the FOIA request on Wednesday.

“Board staff consulted with staff at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (‘Reserve Bank’) and have been advised that such records, if they exist, would be Reserve Bank records, and consequently, not subject to the Board’s Rules Regarding Availability of Information,” the Fed said.

The Federal Reserve said that this publication could take its request to the New York Fed. However, that institution isn’t subject to FOIA.

Headline USA is working on an appeal.

Meanwhile, sound-money advocates are blasting the Fed’s lack of transparency.

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Feds Enforcing Unconstitutional Reporting Law Against Most Businesses

Early this month, a federal judge in Alabama held the Corporate Transparency Act unconstitutional and granted plaintiffs in a lawsuit summary judgment against enforcement of the wide-reaching law, which went into effect this year. For many Americans this raises the questions: “What in hell is the Corporate Transparency Act? Does it affect me?” The quick answer is that it’s a big deal, and if you own an incorporated business, you’ll probably still suffer its intrusive requirements even after the ruling.

“When Congress passed the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, it included a bill called the Corporate Transparency Act (‘CTA’). Although the CTA made up just over 21 pages of the NDAA’s nearly 1,500-page total, the law packs a significant regulatory punch, requiring most entities incorporated under State law to disclose personal stakeholder information to the Treasury Department’s criminal enforcement arm,” Judge Liles C. Burke of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama’s Northeastern Division handily summarized in this month’s ruling.

Large businesses are exempt; the law applies to companies with 20 or fewer employees.

Justifications for the law laid out in early versions of the legislation invoked a laundry list of alleged financial horribles including money laundering and tax evasion. The word terrorism appears, too, of course, because that has been the lazy, default justification for legislation for 20-plus years. Basically, the law is targeted at anything that might involve a modicum of financial privacy.

To that end, the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) set up an online reporting system through which business owners “are required to report information to FinCEN about the individuals who ultimately own or control them.” FinCEN started compiling reports for such “beneficial ownership information” (BOI) on January 1, 2024 with a deadline for compliance of January 1, 2025, or 30 days after creation for companies registered following that date.

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Without More Accountability, Sunshine Laws Are Toothless

This week is Sunshine Week, an annual celebration of transparency laws, which means that government press offices across the country are hard at work pretending they don’t spend the other 51 weeks a year undermining those transparency laws.

If you want to see what your leaders really think of you and your statutory right to know what they’re up to, just ask them to comply with the open government laws on the books.

Two Florida Department of Law Enforcement officers claimed earlier this month that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office blocked the release of DeSantis’ publicly-funded travel records and retaliated against them for arguing that the records were public under the state’s Sunshine Law.

As I wrote last year for Reason‘s special issue on Florida, politicians have been chipping away at the state’s vaunted public records law for decades, but DeSantis and his allies in the Florida Legislature are taking a sledgehammer to it.

Elsewhere in the Sunshine State, a fire chief called the police because a local reporter had the temerity to insist, correctly, that he had a legal right to inspect public records in person. Tampa Bay Times reporter Jason Garcia showed up at the headquarters of the Tampa Fire Rescue Department asking to see paperwork related to a firefighter’s termination. Florida’s Sunshine Law law is unambiguous on this point: “All state, county and municipal records are open for personal inspection and copying by any person.”

Nevertheless, two department employees, one of whom was the personnel chief, argued Garcia had no right to see the records since he’d already filed a records request online. Eventually, Tampa fire chief Barbara Tripp called the police to report Garcia for causing a disturbance, although he left by the time reinforcements arrived to end his reign of terror.

The personnel chief claimed in a memo that Garcia “persisted in being argumentative and repetitive and refused to accept the answer and leave.” 

“No matter how you want to spin it, though, journalists are supposed to ask questions and seek explanations,” the Tampa Bay Times wrote in an editorial about the alleged hullabaloo. “That may rankle people in power, but it doesn’t constitute an unruly disturbance.”

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The Government Doesn’t Want You To See the Unused Space Force Logos

As Sunshine Week 2024 draws to a close, the Air Force has marked the occasion by hiding the draft designs of logos and uniforms for the Space Force.

Reason filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Air Force in January 2020 for drafts or alternate designs for the logo of the nascent Space Force, one of the Trump administration’s more expensive and whimsical farces.

A quick four years later, the Air Force released 122 pages of communications between the public servants who designed the uniforms, logo, and seal for Star Fleet—excuse me, Space Force.

Unfortunately for everyone who was looking forward to seeing Project Runway: Department of Defense Edition, the Air Force redacted all images of the draft versions, citing Exemption (b)(5) of the FOIA.

Exemption (b)(5) is also known as the “deliberative process” exemption. It protects discussions between bureaucrats about policy decisions, under the reasoning that bureaucrats wouldn’t be as frank if everything they said got dragged into the public eye (by annoying reporters like myself). 

Congress amended the FOIA in 2016 to state that agencies should operate with a “presumption of openness” and only withhold documents when there is a “foreseeable harm,” not out of fear of embarrassment. Despite that, federal agencies still regularly abuse exemptions, especially (b)(5). In this case, the Air Force seems to be claiming that its staff would be afraid to design uniforms if their mock-ups were public. Sorry, but fashion’s a tough business.

All is not lost, though. Some tidbits slipped by the censors.

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5,000 more hours of Jan 6 footage to be released by House Oversight Committee

House Speaker Mike Johnson announced Friday the release of 5,000 additional hours of video from the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. 

The additional video, equal to roughly 208 straight days of viewing, is being released by the House Administration Oversight Subcommittee. 

“House Republicans again commend subcommittee Chairman Barry Loudermilk and the entire Committee on House Administration for their ongoing commitment to ensuring that there is full transparency surrounding the events of January 6,” Johnson said.

The release follows Johnson saying in November 2023 that he would make the January 6, 2021, tapes available to the American people and the release of an initial tranche of 90 hours of footage.

There seems to more video in addition to what is being released Friday, with the Administration committee vowing to “continue to release the remaining footage online as expeditiously as possible so that it is accessible to every American.”

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Biden was only told TODAY that Lloyd Austin, 70, had prostate cancer – a month after he was diagnosed: Details of communication failure over secret ICU trip spark more questions for the White House and Pentagon

President Joe Biden was told that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had prostate cancer on Tuesday – the same day the public was informed, sparking more questions about the transparency of the administration and whether the public can trust their government.

‘Nobody at the White House knew that Secretary Austin had prostate cancer until this morning and the President was informed immediately after we were,’ White House spokesman John Kirby said at the daily press briefing. 

Kirby got defensive as he was repeatedly queried about why the commander-in-chief didn’t know the conditions or the where abouts of his top military officer. Austin was diagnosised with cancer a month before his Dec. 22 surgery. He was released the next day and returned to the hosptial via ambulance on Jan. 1 for complications. Biden was told Austin was in the hospital on Jan. 4. 

‘We all recognize that this didn’t unfold the way it should, on so many levels, not just the notification process of the chain of command, but the transparency issue. We all recognize that. And I think we all want to make sure we learn from that,’ Kirby said. 

‘It’s certainly not good, which is why we want to learn from this and we want to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.’

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Congress members will receive secret UFO briefing next week from top spy chief amid growing demands for greater transparency

House Oversight Committee members are set to undergo a classified briefing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), commonly known as UFOs, next week.

The covert meeting, shrouded in mystery, underscores a surging interest among lawmakers from both ends of the spectrum that are demanding increased government transparency on the extraterrestrial front.  

The briefing, scheduled for next Tuesday morning in the Office of House Security, will be conducted by the Office of Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, Thomas A. Monheim. 

Previously, a bipartisan group of Oversight Committee members, led by Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), had sought more details on UFOs, including potential programs for reverse engineering or recovering crashed UFOs.   

This initiative came after a bombshell revelation from former intelligence honcho David Grusch, hinting at the government harboring ‘nonhuman biologics’ from a recovered UFO.   

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What the Media’s Mainstreaming of UFOs Means for Government Transparency

After decades of secrecy and over-classification, the U.S. government is gradually beginning to reveal to the public what it knows about UFOs  —now known as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). In 2021, Congress directed the Department of Defense (DOD) to investigate UAP by establishing an office now called the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which recently published a report describing 274 observations of UAP by DOD units over the period from August 2022 to April 2023. Congress then doubled down on government transparency this year, with both the House and Senate drafting separate versions of the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023, which is being considered this week as part of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.

This about-face on UAP by the government has resulted in a similar response by the media. Once a subject of skepticism and stigma, UAP reports are increasingly regarded as mainstream news. In 2017, the New York Times was the first to reveal a Defense program to collect and analyze data on UAP, including videos captured by U.S. Navy pilots of aerial objects whose flight characteristics were impossible to reproduce with modern military aircraft. These pilots also provided eyewitness accounts of UAP to other respected mainstream outlets, such as CBS’s 60 Minutes in 2021.

More recently, The Debrief broke the biggest development to date with its remarkable report about Pentagon whistleblower David Grusch, who claimed that the U.S. government has been covering up programs to retrieve crashed UAP materials and reverse-engineer them. Unable to resist such a sensational story, news networks nationwide have made the move to cover it regardless of the previous absurdity associated with the topic, in addition to the historic House hearing this year with Grusch and two former Navy pilots who testified on their astonishing observations of UAP while conducting training missions off the East and West Coasts and alleged the government was in possession of non-human “biologics” recovered from crash sites. Just this weekend, NBC’s Meet the Press even featured one of those pilots, Ryan Graves, who discussed his nonprofit, Americans for Safe Aerospace, which he established to investigate UAP and improve safety and awareness of the aerospace domain.

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Powerful members of Congress are dead-set on killing UFO transparency

Since 2020, no fewer than 10 former government officials, military officers and scientists, along with a former senate majority leader, have alleged (or suggested) publicly that the U.S. government has recovered advanced craft of unknown origin — that is, UFOs.

Nearly all of these individuals also claim that the government transferred multiple craft to defense contractors for scientific and technical analysis.

Key members of Congress, drawing on testimony from dozens of whistleblowers, appear to find these extraordinary allegations credible.

Bipartisan legislation sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) aimed to establish a process with the ostensible goal of revealing the existence of “non-human intelligence” to the public. But the legislation, which is co-sponsored by three Republican and two Democratic senators, is now in jeopardy.

In comments yesterday on the Senate floor, Schumer stated that “House Republicans are also attempting to kill another commonsense, bipartisan measure passed by the Senate, which I was proud to cosponsor… to increase transparency around what the government does and does not know about unidentified aerial phenomena.”

According to reports, Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, are leading efforts to prevent any meaningful version of this provision from being added to the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.

Members of Congress generally clamor for enhanced government oversight — a core function of the legislative branch — and transparency. So what could cause a small group of influential lawmakers to suddenly resist it?

Notably, the legislation calls for the U.S. government to reassert control over “recovered technologies of unknown origin” currently held by defense contractors. Some analysts suspect that corporations potentially holding such exotic technology are exerting undue pressure and influence to oppose the provision in Schumer’s legislation.

In his only public comments on the legislation to date, Turner denied “holding up” the measure, while adding, “I do think it’s a poorly drafted piece of legislation.”

A closer analysis of Schumer’s 64-page bill tells a starkly different, and intriguing, story.

At its core, the Schumer legislation strongly hints that elements of the U.S. government, in collaboration with defense contractors, have long operated surreptitious “legacy programs” to “reverse engineer” retrieved UFOs. Other secret programs supposedly “examine biological evidence of living or deceased non-human intelligence.”

The remarkable nature of Schumer’s bipartisan legislation is only trumped by revelations that key members of Congress appear intent on blocking or neutering it for what seems to be no good reason.

As Schumer and his co-sponsors suggest, “credible evidence and testimony indicates” that government records describing UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering programs have been concealed from Congress and the public for decades.

The legislation largely mirrors the allegations of David Grusch, a decorated former military officer and intelligence official. The intelligence community’s internal watchdog deemed Grusch’s whistleblower complaint “credible and urgent.” At the same time, an eyebrow-raising report citing multiple sources alleges that a secretive CIA unit is overseeing clandestine retrievals of “non-human craft.”  

A core objective of the Schumer legislation is to “restore proper oversight over [UFO] records by elected officials in both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government.”

As analysts have noted, there are only two elected officials in the executive branch. So one of the highest-ranking U.S. senators is implying that some presidents and vice presidents have not been informed of clandestine efforts to retrieve and reverse engineer “technologies of unknown origin” — UFOs — or examine “biological evidence of non-human intelligence.”

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DC Judge Refuses To Let Trump See Evidence In His Own J6 Trial

D.C. District Judge Tanya Chutkan has denied former President Donald Trump’s motion to subpoena records from the House of Representatives’ Jan. 6 committee, arguing that his requests are like a fishing expedition.

Her seven-page decision criticized the scope and alleged vagueness of President Trump’s requests. It also argued that he was improperly applying Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 17 to information that could be obtained through other means.

“Defendant has not met his burdens with respect to his proposed Rule 17(c) subpoenas,” Judge Chutkan said.

“He has not sufficiently justified his requests for either the ‘Missing Materials’ themselves or the other five categories of documents related to them.”

Quoting the United States v. Cuthbertson, she added that the “broad scope of the records that defendant seeks, and his vague description of their potential relevance, resemble less ‘a good faith effort to obtain identified evidence’ than they do ‘a general fishing expedition that attempts to use the [Rule 17(c) subpoena] as a discovery device.'”

President Trump’s initial motion from Oct. 11 requested purportedly “missing materials” that the House Select Committee on Jan. 6 had allegedly failed to preserve and transfer to another congressional committee.

Fox News reported in August that Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight for the Committee on House Administration, accused the select committee of failing to provide certain communications with the Biden administration, as well as video recordings of depositions and interviews leveraged by the select committee.

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